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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who is taught to look for racism everywhere - no matter how minor - will find it everywhere. The false-positive rate must be astronomical.

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Yes! I am a female in the tech industry, and we are inundated with warnings about going into a male dominated field. I’ve noticed it gets to a point where some women can’t even receive criticism because they think “he wouldn’t talk to another man like that,” even if the criticism is valid. I can see why it happens though. We hear over and over about being harassed and put down that we almost subconsciously get a chip on our shoulder about it.

I’m not saying that racism or sexism doesn’t happen. But I am saying I see how a person can also take something as racist or sexist just because it’s something you’re told to expect.

That sounds like the robustness principle, featured in RFC 1855 (Netiquette Guidelines) among others: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" or "Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855

O guess these things also depend on country, in Eastern Europe where I'm from many high position successful women leaders have stated that gender quotas are actually offensive and they wouldn't want to be so called diversity hire. I think about it often how Americans who get into somewhere because of their knowledge and skill but are part of some minority think affirmative action (discrimination for us), it would be obvious for people to suspect then they are only there because of lowered exceptions.

On the whole, Eastern Europe seems to have done much better with gender equity than the US.

(That's a relative comparison)

What is scary is that american gender stereotypes are becoming popular. In my school times I never heard "girls have problem with math", on the contrary, the majority of math and science teachers were women. Eastern Europe is unique because we never really had our own petty bourgeois being effectively colonized, so farmers became workers and workers became bankers. Someone really should write a monograph about Eastern European Cooperative Banking, it's quite amazing.

Yes, of course if you look for something you will find more of it. But many Black people are in fact not looking for it at all. And yet, it still finds them and it can hurt them because even if the intention is pure, the action can still hurt.

Perhaps you've had someone innocently comment about how nice it is to see a woman in engineering since there are so few? Maybe that doesn't bother you at all. But what if you get that comment constantly, several times a week for you entire career? I suspect it would start to weigh on you and you would become quite exhausted by it. You might even start feeling that you don't belong. Or maybe wonder if your gender is the only thing people notice about you.

Then also imagine that we all wore name tags that identified your career. And now you can't even escape it when you are not at work, you get it at the checkout line too. And from your waiter, etc, etc.

Ironically, the whole over-reaction can be seen as a form of culture imperialism. Punishing people for using other language is itself racism, in this case, to the Chinese minorities. Last time I check, there is no official language in US.

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